


a way to decide if the light is still red

by lostin_space



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Maria's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 11:58:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19767742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostin_space/pseuds/lostin_space
Summary: michael has a breakdown, they have to bring in the big guns





	a way to decide if the light is still red

**Author's Note:**

> this was written as a way to procrastinate.
> 
> also i know this concept has been done a million times, but I never get tired of reading it, so here we are

Maria woke up to someone crying. **  
**

The main reason it wasn’t immediately clear who was crying was because she couldn’t remember a time Michael Guerin had cried. He was a self-proclaimed tough guy, a hard ass if there ever was one. He didn’t cry. He didn’t ball up in the corner of the room in the middle of the night. He didn’t have real problems.

Except he did and he was just damn good at pretending. 

“Guerin? Are you okay?” Maria asked softly, rubbing the sleep out of her eye. He had his hands folded over the back of his head, his face buried into his knees as he rocked back and forth. He very clearly was not okay.

She crawled out of bed, making her way to the corner he’d stuffed himself in. This was the first night he’d actually stayed over rather than slipped out sometime after she’d gone to sleep. Maybe this is why.

“Michael, what’s wrong?” she asked, crouching down and gently touching his arm. However, she was almost immediately thrown away as he cried out a ’ _no’_.

Her back hit the bed with a gentle thud and she stared at him in shock, slowly catching her breath. He seemed to ball up even more, whimpering and shaking and whispering the same ‘no’ over and over and over. Maria sat there for a moment, debating if she should try to console him again or not. She decided against it and went for her phone. She didn’t want to leave him there, but she also wasn’t about to risk getting herself hurt.

“Hello?” Isobel answered, sleep heavy in her voice as if the phone call had woken her up. Maria spared a moment to wonder why she hadn’t felt that he was in distress. Michael had felt when she stubbed her toe the week prior.

“Hey, uh, Michael’s having like some kind of breakdown. He’s crying in the corner and is unresponsive and he won’t let me get near him,” she said, eyeing Michael and seeing if her talking about him shook him out of it. It didn’t.

“What? What do you mean?” Isobel asked and there was shifting on the other side of the line.

“I mean I woke up to him crying in the corner,” Maria repeated, holding the phone out towards him and hoping it caught his whimpering. “I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can, make sure he doesn’t freak out,” Isobel insisted, hanging up the call. Maria scoffed.

“Yeah, I’ll definitely get on that.”

Maria stood to put a pair of pants on, keeping her eye on Michael. He never made a move outside of rocking, still whimpering and whispering ‘no’. She sat on the bed again. He started pulling at his hair.

“Michael, did you have a bad dream?” she asked, knowing he probably wouldn’t answer. He didn’t.

Isobel showed up in under 15 minutes, somehow looking very put together despite it being two in the morning. She pushed her way into the room, nearing Michael. She crouched in front of him.

“Michael? What’s wrong?” she asked, reaching out to him. Maria was genuinely shocked when he threw her as well, screaming his panic as he desperately tried to back up into the wall. Isobel huffed, slowly making her way back towards him.

Michael threw her three more times before she eventually stopped trying.

“How long has he been like that?” Isobel huffed, rubbing her back. Each time he’d thrown her, he’d gotten a little more touchy and a little harder to get near. He’d started to create some sort of force field around him that would throw you if you tried to push past it. It was getting a little ridiculous.

“At least forty minutes at this point, I guess. I don’t know how long he’s been like that before I woke up,” Maria explained. They both stared at him for a moment, trying to brainstorm ideas on how to break him out of it. She was more than a little nervous that he would be like that forever. He would just pick up more and more shit, becoming a living weapon. Or something. She wasn’t sure that’s how it worked.

“Okay, then I’m going to call Max,” Isobel said. Maria grabbed her arm.

“Is that a good idea? I mean, won’t that just make him more agitated?” Isobel shrugged her shoulders, rubbing her eyes with a yawn.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she said. Maria didn’t have a good argument to get her to stop.

Isobel walked out of the room to go call Max and Maria retreated back to the bed, watching him panic. She felt bad that she couldn’t help. What kind of girlfriend was she? One who was completely oblivious to her boyfriend’s troubles apparently.

Or maybe it was an alien thing. Maybe this had nothing to do with him and his issues and had everything to do with the fact he and Liz had been spending too much time experimenting. That had to be a possibility. It absolutely had nothing to do with the fact that this was their first legit night together.

It took Max and Liz nearly 25 minutes to show up which left far too much time for Maria and Isobel to awkwardly stare at Michael. He was still shaking, rocking, saying his ‘no’, and vaguely crying. She didn’t even know how he had it in him to panic for that long, it was getting to a new level of concern.

“What’s going on?” Liz asked. Maria, again, gave them a rundown of the events. Which just led to them doing the same shit that she and Isobel already tried.

“Michael, seriously, what’s wrong?” Max asked as if that would help before being thrown due to trying to enter Michael’s power bubble.

“C’mon, Mikey, it’s okay. Let us help,” Liz cooed, basically petting the force field. Max stood behind her just in case Michael tried to throw her.

They tried and tried and tried and tried and tried until eventually, they couldn’t even enter the bedroom anymore due to the size of the force field. Nothing was fucking working. In fact, it was debatably making it worse. Maria couldn’t help but feel even more pity as she stared at him, watching him sob into his knees. Each time they’d tried to push past the force field, it seemed to directly affect him in the worst way. She couldn’t count the number of times she had to listen to him scream and not be able to help because he wouldn’t let her.

“Okay, what do we do now?” Maria asked, anxiously chewing on her nails. It had escalated from a minor inconvenience to having a literal ticking time bomb in her bedroom. Isobel and Max shared a look.

“I’m gonna go call Alex,” Max decided. Maria furrowed her eyebrows.

“Why? What can Alex do that we haven’t already?” she asked. She knew she was sounding a bit naive, but she had effectively worked herself into functioning denial. Michael had insisted that whatever happened between the two of them had been long over and she had decided to listen. Even if it meant Alex went out of his way to avoid her now.

“How much do you know about the two of them?” Isobel asked cautiously as Max took a step aside to call him. Maria crossed her arms over her chest as she looked over to Michael. She realized she didn’t know a single goddamn detail outside of them sharing a kiss back in high school and Alex still pining years later. “Look, I guess I don’t know much either, but I do know Alex is our best bet. He’s spent more nights with him over the years than anyone else.” Maria would be lying if she said that didn’t make her feel sick.

No one questioned it when Alex somehow managed to pull up to the Wild Pony in under 20 minutes when his cabin was a solid 35 minutes away.

The four of them watched as Alex trudged up the stairs with nothing but sheer annoyance on his face. Maria held more shame than she wanted to admit. How pathetic was it that they had to resort to calling her boyfriend’s ex-something so he could calm down? A selfish part of her hoped it wouldn’t work.

“What exactly is going on?” Alex asked as he reached the apartment door. He looked more than a little exhausted and she was regretting letting Max call him more and more by the minute.

“We went to bed and he was fine, but when I woke up, he was crying in the corner of my room. He won’t let anyone near him, he’d created this giant force field type of thing around him and it keeps getting bigger each time we try to get close. It’s basically my entire bedroom now,” Maria explained, hoping to do her best at dropping hints that they were in fact together. It was petty, but she couldn’t help it. Alex’s eyebrows knitted together.

“A force field?” he repeated. They all nodded. “How long has he been like that?”

“An hour and a half, maybe two hours,” Isobel said, looking to Maria for confirmation. Alex’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head, his lips parting in disbelief.

“Two hours? You fucked with him for two fucking‒” Alex cut himself off, closing his eyes and taking a deep, regulated breath, “Next time, if you can’t calm him down in 20 minutes, call me.”

“We’re not even sure if he’s awake,” Max jumped in. Alex scoffed.

“He has night terrors and he’s really good at waking himself up within 15 minutes. He’s been awake, he’s just fucking terrified,” he said, giving a tight smile.

“We didn’t know,” Liz murmured.

“You should’ve! He’s supposedly your best friend, your brother, your boyfriend and none of you even knew that he had fucking night terrors. It’s something you all should’ve known one way or another,” he snapped. Maria was slowly feeling every ounce of guilt and jealousy slip from her grasp, easily being replaced with irritation.

“It’s not like he tells us,” Maria argued, crossing her arms over her chest and slightly popping her him to the side. Alex let out a dry laugh, shaking his head.

“You all think his walls are so fucking high. They aren’t. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Michael talks a _lot_. He’s hurting and he had been since the day I met him. He wants to talk, he wants to vent, but he feels like a burden, so he stops himself,” Alex said, glaring in a painfully protective manner, “All you have to do is ask twice.”

Maria hated her abilities for a moment. She could feel the guilt build up in the small space until it became suffocating. Clearly, there had been occasions where they all had been dismissive and never asked twice.

“You don’t have to be a dick about it, Alex,” Maria stated simply. He snorted.

“Oh, I think I am perfectly justified in being a dick. You woke me up because you don’t know how to take care of your boyfriend when he needs you,” Alex said simply. It was a low blow and she couldn’t help but glare.

“Then why the hell did you come?”

“Because I love him and he needs me,” Alex admitted, not a trace of a lie to be found on his features, “And he would be right there if I needed him. It’s what you do for family.”

The word ’ _family_ ’ hung in the air even when he turned swiftly and made his way into the apartment. She wanted to take it as another low blow, but she couldn’t. Instead, she took a deep breath and followed him inside.

The four of them hardly kept their distance as Alex felt for the force field, stopping in his tracks once he touched it. He took a heavy breath and forced on a kind smile.

“Guerin,” he called. For the first time in hours, his curly head popped up. His face was sunken in and tear stained and red; his eyes were frantic.

“Alex?”

Maria gulped as she watched Alex’s fake smile become real.

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Are you okay?”

Alex let out a soft laugh as he said, “I’m fine. You can check if you let me in.”

Michael nodded immediately even though he stayed in the corner and the force field visibly morphed to accommodate for Alex’s entrance. It snapped back in place once he entered.

“Did you know you could create a force field?” Alex asked softly. Michael reached out his right hand, pathetically making a grabby motion not too unlike a toddler except instead of a toy, it was Alex Manes. “I didn’t. I think it’s pretty cool.”

He slowly lowered himself onto the ground in front of the alien and, once he landed, Michael rocked forward and landed against Alex’s chest with a thud. They sat in silence for a moment, Micahel laying against him and gripping his shirt as tight as he could. There was something painful about the way he calmed each time Alex ran his fingers through his hair. He didn’t do that for Maria.

Soon, their foreheads met and the comfort wafted off of them in overwhelming waves. Michael was staring at him like he was the most precious thing in the world, stroking his cheek with his left hand.

“Why wouldn’t you let anyone come near you?” Alex asked. Michael’s bottom lip protruded in a pout, his grip on Alex’s shirt tightening.

“I thought something bad happened to you,” he whimpered. Alex smiled sweetly, still flitting his fingers through his hair.

“So, what you’re saying is that if something _does_ happen to me, you’re just going to hide out in a force field forever?” Alex asked. Michael sniffled loudly and gave a weak shrug. Alex huffed a laugh. “Well, you’re in luck,” he hummed, grabbing Michael’s calves and pulling him basically into his lap, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Maria turned away, letting her back hit the wall beside the open doorway.

“So, what, am I supposed to just give over my bedroom to my boyfriend and his ex for the night?” Maria scoffed. All the looks that turned her way made her question if she should even still be considering him her boyfriend. Maybe she shouldn’t.

This was going to be a long night.

**Author's Note:**

> also on my tumblr: spaceskam


End file.
